Greater than Five-Order-of-Magnitude Postcompression Temporal Contrast Improvement with an Ionization Plasma Grating.

High-intensity lasers require suppression of prepulses and other nonideal temporal structure to avoid target disruption before the arrival of the main pulse. To address this, we demonstrate that ionization gratings act as a controllable optical switch for high-power light with a temporal contrast improvement of at least 3×10^{5} and a switching time less than 500 fs. We also show that a grating system can run for hours at 10 Hz without degradation.

Pituitary Apoplexy With Transition to Acute Hypophysitis in a Patient With Sars-CoV-2 Pneumonia.

COVID-19 is a systemic disease associated with respiratory insufficiency, systemic inflammation, as well as coagulation, neurological, and endocrine disorders. Among them pituitary apoplexy (PA) as well as, more rarely, acute hypophysitis (AH) have been reported. In the present report, we described a case of PA in an 84-year-old man with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia, with a previous unknown pituitary adenoma and a possible but not confirmed overlap with transitory AH.

Habits and Routines of Adults in Early Recovery From Substance Use Disorder: Clinical and Research Implications From a Mixed Methodology Exploratory Study.

The purpose of this exploratory, non-experimental mixed methods study was to analyze the habits and routines of adults in early recovery (>3 months) from substance use disorder (SUD). Participants (N = 14) were recruited from an intensive outpatient treatment (IOP) program for substance use disorders. Data collection consisted of a demographic survey, a researcher developed Daily Occupational Questionnaire (DOQ), and follow-up semi-structured interviews with 5 randomly selected participants.

Holographic Plasma Lenses.

A hologram fully encodes a three-dimensional light field by imprinting the interference between the field and a reference beam in a recording medium. Here we show that two collinear pump lasers with different foci overlapped in a gas jet produce a holographic plasma lens capable of focusing or collimating a probe laser at intensities several orders-of-magnitude higher than the limits of a nonionized optic. We outline the theory of these diffractive plasma lenses and present simulations for two plasma mechanisms that allow their construction: spatially varying ionization and ponderomotively driven ion-density fluctuations.

A multi-terawatt two-color beam for high-power field-controlled nonlinear optics.

Two-color laser beams are instrumental in light-field control and enhancement of high-order harmonic, spectral supercontinuum, and terahertz radiation generated in gases, plasmas, and solids. We demonstrate a multi-terawatt two-color beam produced using a relativistic plasma mirror, with 110 mJ at 800 nm and 30 mJ at 400 nm. Both color components have high spatial quality and can be simultaneously focused, provided that the plasma mirror lies within a Rayleigh range of the driving fundamental beam.